New Poetry

CHRONIC PAIN

by Risa Denenberg

She shoves us to our knees while we plead
for mercy and praise her name. We suck

where she directs our mouths and study the whip,
scanning sideways for an exit. Fear impounds us.
Grown men snivel. She punishes without pity.

She devours muscles, tendons, bursa,
vertebrae. Frontal lobes sear with seizures,
blurring what was once sharp and certain.

It all hurts — the domain dwelled in, swallowed,
regurgitated. We snatch burnt and broken parts
from jawbones, then feel their phantom pain.

Every small pleasure is a debt roused
by shame clawing in its cage.

SEX OFFENDER

after the lost memory of skin

Bearing in mind this boy was a virgin,
and admitting one's faults is no easy
program. Yearning for love is not
a criminal matter. He sits on a low stool
for the long sentence. His bed, a causeway.

His father abandoned him, they killed
his iguana, all the while, his penis was soft.

SCORE

She hoists the prize high above his head. He rises onto tiptoes,
lifts off the tarmac. Arms strain, shoulders sprout wings.
He would fly across the ocean to seal this pact.

Will she or won’t she? She doesn't say — lupine mouth,
lipstick smile, seductive as a golden calf. Evading
his advances at the hoop, she scoops it higher, higher.

He grows — not fast enough, or too fast. Now she is down low,
a low-down dribbler, passing smoothly right between his legs.
She seals the answer in an envelope and hugs the berry-trophy

close to her chest. Burning through the night with the fever
of her knowledge, her body is a secret thing, an evil thing,
an unknown, unknowable, terrible thing.

Risa Denenberg is an aging hippie poet currently living in Sequim Washington. She earns her keep as a nurse practitioner. She has two chapbooks: what we owe each other (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2013) and blinded by clouds (forthcoming, Hyacynth Girls Press); and a full length volume, Mean Distance from the Sun (Aldrich Press, 2013).